Television

Thursday, February 14, 2019

Police look to recruit non-citizens with legal status

My former classmate at Penn, Simone Weichselbaum, wrote for The Marshall Project:

Non-citizens with legal status can enlist in the U.S.
military and risk their lives in combat. But in most states they cannot be
employed as police officers. Now dozens of police chiefs and sheriffs, alarmed
at the shrinking numbers of qualified recruits, want to see the long-standing
prohibition lifted.

“I don’t think someone’s citizenship is indicative in any
way of someone’s suitability to be a police officer,” said Police Chief Tom
Manger in Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburb of Washington D.C. He co-chairs
a national task force of policing executives, which includes members who are
lobbying legislatures to change the law in Maryland and elsewhere.

The movement is part of a broader recognition that the
difficulty in recruiting police is not just a result of low pay and battered
morale—the so-called Ferguson Effect—but of numerous obstacles thrown up by
politicians or police themselves.

Jurisdiction by jurisdiction, those barriers are being
challenged, often successfully.

A growing number of law enforcement agencies will now accept
applicants who admit past drug use or have arrest records for low-level
offenses, who lack college degrees and who sport tattoos or facial hair.

But frustrated cops say they are still being handcuffed by
arcane state laws and slow-to-respond state oversight commissions.

About Matt

An analysis of crime and punishment from the perspective of a former prosecutor and current criminal justice practitioner.
The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions or postions of any county, state or federal agency.